Having seen what else the French and Japanese will eat, I would say you are setting the bar pretty low there. 
I agree with the OP - I don’t want to eat horse meat and I don’t particularly want to see horses slaughtered, but it beats the hell out of seeing them starved by “rescuers” or packed into trailers to be slaughtered in Mexico or all the other unintended consequences of the slaughter “ban”. The recession and reckless overbreeding of low quality animals have combined to cause a lot of needless animal suffering, and the easiest thing about it to fix is the slaughter ban.
Oh, now you’ve done it … he’s going to show up at your doorstep with a seal hot dog.
For some reason I can no longer recall, I think Attack from the 3rd dimension is male; if not, please pardon my pronoun error above.
There’s a number of problems with the current horse slaughter situation that haven’t been mentioned here.
Since US horse slaughter has been made illegal, they’re now just shipping the horses across the border to Mexico or Canada for slaughter. The number of horses going to slaughter hasn’t changed in the slightest. (cite: A Study of Equine Slaughter/ Abuse Patterns Following Closure of Horse Slaughter Plants in US – Animal Law Coalition This only uses statistics through 2008, I don’t have a more recent cite handy, but I understand that the conclusions still stand.) Therefore the closing of the US slaughter houses has not contributed to neglect cases. The number of abuse cases is directly correlated with the worsening economy.
While I personally wouldn’t eat horse, I don’t have a problem with using the meat as long as the animal is killed humanely. The current situation is extremely inhumane. Horses are often packed into double-decker trailers designed for cows, and hauled several hundred miles to the border. Severe injuries and deaths are common. Regulations state that they can’t haul foals or stallions, but these are often ignored. (I don’t have time to find a cite for this right now, but I can find it if someones’ interested.)
It’s more difficult to humanely slaughter a horse than a cow, they’re far higher strung animals and it’s easier to miss on the killing blow. I’m not sure about Canadian slaughterhouses, but Mexican ones are often brutal places. A common method of ‘stunning’ a horse before killing it is to plunge a knife into the horse’s withers at the base of the neck in an attempt to sever the spinal cord. Then they cut the throat and bleed it out. In this respect, reopening carefully regulated American slaughterhouses could lead to more humane treatment of the horses being slaughtered. (Again with not having a cite on hand, but I can look it up if you want to see it.)
The great majority of American horses have received medical treatments that make them unfit for human consumption. The most common is a drug called bute - it’s asprin for horses, but it’s toxic to humans and stays in the horse’s muscles for its entire life. I’m told anecdotally that the Europeans who eventually consume the horse meat are told it’s all from mustangs that have never been medically treated - on the contrary, it’s mostly former racehorses and unwanted domestic animals. So there’s a big problem with selling horsemeat for human consumption right there.
Taking all that into consideration, especially the last point, I’d much rather keep American slaughterhouses closed and outlaw shipping horses out of the country for slaughter. IMHO unwanted large animals should be euthed by animal control the same way that we do for cats and dogs. Putting a $100 charge on the export of live horses would take all the profit right out of the current meat market, which would effectively stop most of that, and the money from legitimate exports could help offset the cost of euthanasia.
The other part of the equation is reducing the supply of unwanted horses being bred in America. Right now the availability of slaughter is an incentive for breeders to produce 100 foals looking for their one winner - the ones that aren’t worth showing are still worth $200-$300 in the meat market, and that helps offset their costs. There’s also a massive amount of education needed. There are far too many ‘backyard breeders’ who churn out worthless horses with the misguided impression that they’ll make money off them. It’s a bad situation all the way around.
Hi FlyByNight512, and welcome to the Straight Dope!
I had some problems with the the report you cited. Now I only skimmed it. But look at the first chart. It shows us slaughters dropping precipitously in 2007, and total slaughters dropping somewhat. Yes, Canadian and Mexican horse harvesting increased - but by less than the US decreased. The total drop of about 20,000 horses is wholly consistent with reports of abandonment.
Secondly, the methodology was pretty weak: The sorts of abandonment statistics I’ve seen are 4 figures – they should be swamped by the hundreds of thousands of horses that put to the knife. Finally, it’s very odd to present what’s basically a study of a market without a detailed treatment of prices.
More broadly though, I think we agree that the current ban on US horse slaughterhouses could be made to work. But you can’t just slap a $100 duty on exports without potentially running foul of international trade agreements. I understand though that you could ban the slaughter of US horses for food: that would be ok, since it would treat foreign and domestic producers the same way. (Remember that our ban is a de facto one, and not a formal one, something that foreign trade reps would notice.)
That said, I’d prefer to just permit the killing of horses for meat. It would lower horse abuse. Besides, if you can kill a horse humanely I really don’t see the problem with making use of its meat. The bute problem could be handled via labeling: Japan and Europe both have very acceptable regulatory apparatuses.
Ok, that last paragraph has some hand-waving. I see that the EU is demanding better food safety through traceability: it’s possible that the indirect export market for US race horses could collapse. I don’t know whether there are sufficient mustangs to support a US horse slaughterhouse industry. If there are, I opine we should have them. If not, the OP may become mute if Europe decides that our horsemeat is too contaminated.
Thought I would bump this because the horse meat inspection ban has been lifted, meaning that horse slaughterhouses can now be built and meat can be sold in the US.
My filet Flicka.
That’s a moo point.
mmm
The problem with this sort of argument is that it applies an odd sort of definition of “relationship” to entire species.
I don’t have any relationship with horses. I have a pet cat, and I’d never eat her, nor would I eat the pets of people I know (regardless of animal) out of respect for them. But aside from that, they’re all just animals. I have no ethical problem eating a stranger horse, cow, pig, rabbit, cat, or iguana, provided that they’re treated and slaughtered humanely and safe to eat. People have pet rabbits and guinea pigs, too, but those species are often eaten.
If someone has a special relationship with a horse or horses, then they can not sell them to slaughterhouses, and choose not to eat horsemeat. Suggesting that the society as a whole has some sort of relationship with certain species doesn’t make any sense to me.
Of course, of course.
Thanks StP. I’ll note that the Humane Society appears to be mau-mauing against the proposal:
Humane Society Opposes Horse Slaughter in U.S. | IBTimes
There’s another animal rights group that I oppose.
Personally, no. But unless you’re completely detached from American culture you should certainly understand why we place animals in different categories. Typically we don’t place horses in the same category as cows or pigs.
Look, I specifically went out of my way to make it clear that I see no ethical difference between eating a horse and eating a cow. What I objected to was the idea that placing animals in different categories was stupid. It isn’t. We (culturally) place animals in different categories for a wide variety of reasons. We (culturally) have a different relationship with cats, horses and dogs than we do with cows, pigs and salmon.
It makes perfect sense to me. Society as a whole certainly has a relationship with cows, pigs and chickens. It doesn’t make any sense to me that someone couldn’t see that.
By “we”, do you mean you and a bunch of other people? I don’t deny that lots of people do that. I’m not blind. But you can’t act like American culture is homogenous. My point is that I don’t place them in categories. To me, animals are in the categories of “pets” and “not pets”. It’s ok to eat the latter, and it’s not based on what type of animal it is. I, personally, have known more people who have pet pigs, rabbits, and guinea pigs (all species that were until very recently were primarily raised for food) than I know people who have pet horses. But even those people didn’t seem to have a problem eating other pigs or rabbits (I don’t think guinea pig is served as food much in North America, so I don’t know how they would react to that). They seemed to draw the same line as I did for animals. Ok to eat non-pets. Not ok to eat pets.
I actually don’t understand why people categorize animals based on species. I understand that they do so, and I think it’s based on some sort of not-well-thought-out emotional response. It wouldn’t be the first odd emotionally driven decision lots people make that I can’t quite wrap my head around.
I don’t have a problem with other people making whatever animal categories they want. I just think it’s a poor idea to write such silliness into the law.
I don’t see how the two would be antithetical. Let Black Thunder pull a cart all his life. Then we eat him. Problem solved.
Besides, in this day and age how many actual useful tasks are still performed by horses ? As far as I can see, these days it all boils down to entertainment. For that matter, oxen have historically done much of the same useful work horses ever did if at a more gentle plodding pace, so…